February 18, 2009When business gets tough, businesses stop marketing. When government spending gets cut, governments cut prevention programs first.
We are seeing a lot of that thinking these days. It never made any sense to me. General Motors is in desperate need of customers. The company is winning the battle in customer satisfaction and mileage ratings, but it’s losing market share all the while it’s cutting its advertising to the bone. How does it expect to sell more cars?
The same kind of short-term thinking has surfaced again in the Capitol. A decade-long effort to stop child abuse and neglect where most of it happens, in the home, has demonstrated the best results of any state program I have ever seen — period. It is rescuing infants from a lifetime of suffering and institutionalization and other forms of state support. And, yet, it’s threatened with the same fate as advertising at GM. It’s being cut out of the state budget.
We can’t do anything about advertising at GM, perhaps. We are mostly grateful for the life support from the Fed. But we should be mad as hell that the so-called “Zero to Three” abuse and neglect prevention program is getting whacked. We should be standing on the steps of the Capitol screaming, “Not on my watch.” We should insist that the governor, her cabinet, and every member of the legislature are there with us — on the steps of the Capitol, that is, and saying, “Not on my watch, either.” As FDR and George Romney would have said: “If not us, who? If not now, when?”
Last year the state spent a measly $6.6 million on a program to send child development specialists into the nearly 2,000 Michigan homes with children from birth to three years old. These were not just any homes. The state says the kids who live in these homes have three or more risk factors used to predict abuse and neglect.
That sounds like a pilot program, but it was not. This was the eighth year of a very successful effort started under Governor Engler, and carried on brilliantly by Governor Granholm. Despite spectacular results, this effort is about to become an historical footnote that our grandchildren will point back to someday and say, “What were they thinking?”
This program is not some theoretical proposition. The 3,320 kids in the homes on the program’s list — some might say “the monitored homes” — are officially recorded as children at high risk for abuse and neglect. And, if you have any doubt about the long-term impact of abuse and neglect, spend some time talking to victims. You can find lots of them in our state prisons.
The specialists sent into these high-risk homes provide a variety of “interventions,” but their greatest impact may come from the fact that there is somebody watching. They watch, all right, and they do more. Parents get help finding community resources — food, nutrition, medical care. They enroll in support groups. They get parent training and family counseling and volunteer transportation help.
A report issued this month by the Children’s Trust Fund and a coalition of state agencies (available at the CTF website at www.michigan.gov/ctf) is nothing short of startling. Last year, the $6.6 million spent by the state on this innovative, in-home program saved an estimated $49 million in direct service costs. That’s $49 million on a $6.6 million state investment. This coalition advocates finding an additional $10 million or more to add to the program this year. You do the math, but I’d say you can build a lot of roads and hire a lot of teachers with the money that this program will save over time. And maybe, 15 or 20 years from now, we won’t have to operate so many prisons.
I learned about this report on my job. My university department receives funding for research, outreach and education from the Children’s Trust Fund — funded by private donations and federal grants — not state funds. And we are out looking for more foundation and federal money to help the trust and its national affiliate, Prevent Child Abuse America, get to the bottom of the tragedy of all forms of child abuse and to understand how to generate public interest in the ethical treatment of children.
To some, the effort to wipe out the abuse and neglect of Michigan’s children may seem hopeless. But, there is a point at which we have to draw the line. Maybe this is that point. Maybe this is the point at which a great chorus of Michigan residents will stand up and ask: “How can you possibly cut a program that is saving money by saving kids from abuse and neglect? Not on my watch, you won’t.”
“Not on my watch…”
Richard Cole is professor and chairperson of the Department of Advertising, Public Relations and Retailing at Michigan State University. The opinions expressed reflect his individual viewpoint and not that of the university.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Bill Long // Feb 21, 2009 at 3:48 pm
I couldn’t agree with you more Rick. As a former director of a private non profit association of non profit agencies serving families and children who are in foster care homes or institutions because prevention programs like these were not there, it makes no sense to cut these programs. Stimulus or no Stimulus money – the State needs to step up to the plate and keep these programs available to kids and familes.
2 David Wallin // Feb 25, 2009 at 12:27 pm
I question this kind of expense for “intravention” in parents homes for merely 2000 children. That is $3300/child state expense before they are even off the ground. With that kind of state support if these numbers are continued, the cost per birth of such children by the time they are 60 would be $198,000 /child.
Even if it works well, where is the end to the cost. This work used to be done by compassionate individuals in communities who cared for one another AT NO EXPENSE AT ALL.
I am concerned also. But money does not grow on trees, and I still believe right, wrong, or indifferent that such money breeds more dependency and that the State of Michigan is not capable of taking care of dependent families to this extent. We will go broke.
Maybe I am the idiot here. But PhD studies that create new “Job opportunities for Master Degrees in Social Work applicants” IS INTERVENTION IN THE AUTHORITY OF THE HOME. Every law enforcement office in the state is already confessing to me that they can not possibly become parents to every child who ACTUALLY NEEDS IT. It is just not possible, but my wife and I would take in such a child.
3 Norm Cohen, NOCIRC of Michigan // Mar 1, 2009 at 9:05 pm
These are absolutely essential programs for child abuse prevention, health promotion, and family outreach. Why then, is the State still spending $2.6 million a year paying for unnecessary, non-therapeutic newborn circumcisions?
Across our nation, 16 states have eliminated Medicaid coverage for circumcisions in response to their own budget crises: Arizona, California, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oregon, Utah, and Washington. Since 1996, infant circumcision has not been a publicly insured service throughout Canada.
The decision to drop coverage has always been based on the lack of valid medical indications for the procedure. Routine circumcision is not recommended by any national medical health organization in the world. The United States Congress appropriates Medicaid funds to states only for medically necessary services. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has defined circumcision performed at parental request as medically unnecessary.
The national circumcision rate has now dropped to 55%. Circumcision is the only surgery performed on children without a diagnosis, and it is the most common one performed on them. Circumcision performed at parental request is something other than medicine, and it cannot stand up to objective budget scrutiny because it cannot meet Medicaid’s criteria of “medically necessary.”
The savings will enable Medicaid to provide $2.6 million more every year in better healthcare, outreach, and prevention services for Michigan’s children.
4 Rita Casey // Mar 20, 2009 at 12:22 pm
Let me speak to a couple of the issues that Mr. Wallin raises – this isn’t the forum to address all of them. First, to money. No one has said that the cost of intervention with this families is a life-time $3300 per year cost per child. And will “merely 2000″ children be assisted? No, that’s not truly the case. When a child is helped, the parents will be helped, and if the parents, many of whom are undereducated with respect to ordinary child care, become better parents as a result, additional children born to the family will also be assisted. When these assisted children are grown, they will be better parents, too, because they will parent their children as they themselves were raised.
These interventions are not designed to thwart or replace the authority of the home. Rather, they help provide homes with proper authority: good discipline and good child-rearing practices, sensitive to the age of the child. One of your alternate proposals, to depend on the volunteer efforts of caring people in the community, is a great idea, but it hasn’t worked recently, has it? Most of us don’t know whether a parent needs assistance, encouragement, or guidance in raising his or her child. What I do know, is that children, if they drop out of school, if they are disciplined so poorly that they lack enough control to learn, if their health is poor, if they are abused or neglected, then our community, our state, will pay eventually, and a lot more than $3300 per child.
And as to Mr. Wallin’s second alternative, taking in these children, presumes removal of parental rights, a far more drastic step than offering state-funded assistance for a short period of time. Removing a child is more than thwarting the authority of the home, it is destroying and replacing the home.
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